Saturday, March 29, 2014

This week I visited the Google offices near Tottenham Court
Road to see how businesses are using the Google Apps Platform.

The event was run by a company called Netpremacy.They have an offering called AppsCare which
is specifically designed for helping companies move from a hosted Exchange or
Lotus environment to a fully hosted Google Apps environment.

Google being Google, the offices couldn't be a simple
affair!They have huge shagpile carpets
of the Google Chrome icon and a very industrial effect in the Seminar room the
event was held in.

Anyway, enough of the fancy dan stuff, how was the day?

Well it was great, hugely thought provoking and left me
questioning a lot of decisions we as Systems Administrators, Engineers and
Architects generally make.

I generally like the Google offering, I use Gmail and have
recently purchased 100GB of Google Drive space when they announced their huge
price cuts.

http://lifehacker.com/prices-for-monthly-google-drive-storage-plans-dropped-m-1543138182From a work perspective I was always a little sceptical of
how it good it would be.This seminar
wasa great opportunity to talk with
other customers who are similar to us, talk to the experts who have migrated
many customers over to Google and Just Eat (the online takeaway aggregate
system) were there to provide an overview of how moving to Google Apps has really
empowered their business.

Pros
Scalability - The Google platform has been built with scale in mind.This means that if your business employs
another 300 staff at short notice or you acquire another company, you can
easily add these users to your Google Apps company.This is extremely attractive because it takes
a huge headache away from Architects and Administrators who need to tweak
existing systems every 6 months when the business change their plans.
Cost - At £33 per user per year the offering is excellent.Each user gets 30GB for Gmail and Google
Drive (which can be upgraded)
Consumer Lead - Gmail is the one of the most used email systems used across the
world.Most users are comfortable with
the platform.Taking this into the
business will probably be easy for the majority of users.
Collaboration - The Google platform allows users to collaborate using Gmail,
Hangouts for IM and VC and Google+ for a Intranet Facebook style platform.This is great for companies who don't fancy
buying and configuring separate products e.g. Configuring Microsoft Lync is NOT
simple!

Cons
Compatibility - The Google docs platform is excellent, however there are bound
to be things which do not play ball with the Microsoft Office package.I can imagine how frustrated Finance and
Legal departments might get when trying to use Google Docs instead of Word and
Excel.The upside is that you can still
use the Office package for editing, but it is an extra cost.
Data Access -For VDI or SBC platforms
it makes sense to have Exchange and file storage in the datacentre next to
their Citrix or VMware environment for speed.Moving this data into the cloud starts to dilute this platform.Also trying to use Legacy desktop apps to
access and edit files in Gmail and Google Drive might not be very easy, if
possible at all in some circumstances.
Revenue cost -This one is curious.Many companies have been used to allocating
spend in capital terms with a small amount of support and maintenance each
year.Google Apps and many other
platforms these days are charging per user per year.This is not wrong, but a shift in the way of
thinking for many IT and Finance departments.
Change - It is a huge change!If the
company is not behind the project, it is destined to fail.

There are lots of other Pros and Cons but these are the main
things.To put things into perspective I
made notes of all of the system costs which could be reduced or eliminated by
going Google.The list was pretty large
by the end of the day!Every time I
added another item it made me steer toward Google.

All of this for £33 per user per year..........................It
is hard to argue!

Conclusion

I think small companies and start-ups will flock to the
Google Apps platform.It just doesn't
make financial sense for these type of companies to worry about configuring
hardware, software, making it highly available etc.

For the larger organisation it is a different story.It would require buy-in from the very
top.If the CEO is not on board then the
project will fail.